Japan Story is published today

A fresh and surprising account of Japan’s culture from the ‘opening up’ of the country in the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Japan Story is told through the eyes of people who greeted this seismic change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan’s modernizers and nationalists, but with resistance, conflict, distress. This dazzling and original book digs beneath the surface of a highly complex society, and confounds the particular image of Japan that its government likes to portray. Neil MacGregor, author of Living with the Gods and former director of the British Museum, praised it as ‘masterly.’